Great Exit Wave Is Coming — Most Founders Aren't Ready

A third of the world's entrepreneurs plan to exit their businesses within five years.

That number comes from the 2026 UBS Global Entrepreneur Report, published March 11, which surveyed 215 founders with a combined $34.3 billion in annual revenue across 26 markets. Among US founders, the figure is 63%. For those over 65, it's 57%. The exit wave isn't coming. It's already queuing up.

The same report shows 68% are optimistic about their prospects, 80% plan to hire, and 45% are eyeing international expansion. But 32% admit they haven't built up their private wealth as much as they could. In the US, that number is 47%. Confident about the business, unprepared for what comes after.

Identity Problem Nobody Plans For

The Exit Planning Institute's research puts a price on that unpreparedness: approximately 75% of founders experience profound regret within a year of selling. Not because the deal was bad. Because most founder exit planning focuses on the transaction, and almost none of it addresses what happens afterwards.

The UBS data makes the gap visible. When asked about post-exit priorities, 67% of founders said they'd focus on helping heirs manage wealth responsibly. 61% flagged tax efficiency of asset transfers.

42% plan to focus on personal wealth only after the sale. That statistic deserves its own beat. Nearly half of founders heading for a liquidity event have no personal wealth strategy in place at the moment they'll need one most.

What's absent from every response category: what happens to the founder as a person.

Research on post-exit psychology is consistent and unsettling. Dr. Elizabeth Rouse at Boston University found that founders with a "stewarding orientation," those most deeply invested in their companies, experience the most psychological destabilisation during exits, even successful ones. Jason Cohen's widely-cited essay on A Smart Bear describes founders experiencing deep, prolonged sadness after selling. Studies on Olympic athletes retiring from competition, the closest psychological parallel, describe loss, turmoil, and identity confusion that can last years.

The pattern is well-documented: founders who treat exit as a financial transaction and neglect the identity transition tend to make their worst capital decisions in the 6-18 months that follow. Lifestyle inflation, concentrated bets on friends' startups, panic-driven portfolio construction. The $10M trap isn't about being reckless. It's about deploying capital while psychologically unmoored.

Founders who handle transitions well tend to have built interests, relationships, and decision-making infrastructure outside the business before they needed them. They planned the aftermath with the same rigour they applied to the deal itself.

UK Tax Clock: 17 Days and Counting

For any UK-connected founder considering a disposal, secondary sale, or distribution, three tax changes take effect on 6 April 2026.

Business Asset Disposal Relief (BADR) rises from 14% to 18%. BADR is the CGT relief available to qualifying business owners on up to £1 million of lifetime gains. At 14%, the maximum tax saving versus the standard 24% rate is £100,000. At 18%, that saving drops to £60,000.

For a founder selling shares worth £1 million or more in qualifying gains, the difference between completing before and after 6 April is £40,000 in additional tax on the first million alone. Deloitte's year-end guidance and multiple law firms (Baker McKenzie, Brodies, BDO) have published detailed walkthroughs of the deadline and eligibility conditions.

Carried interest moves from CGT to income tax. From 6 April, all UK carried interest will be taxed as deemed trading income rather than under the capital gains framework. For "qualifying" carry that meets the average holding period test (roughly 40 months), the effective rate lands at approximately 34.1%, including NICs, up from the current 32% interim rate. For non-qualifying carry, the rate can reach 47%. This isn't a tweak. It's a structural overhaul that affects every GP, fund manager, and LLP member with UK exposure.

Dividend tax rates rise by 2%. The higher rate climbs to roughly 35.6%. Combined with the £500 dividend allowance (down from £2,000 two years ago), founders receiving distributions from holding companies face meaningfully different after-tax outcomes.

None of these changes is a surprise. They were announced in the Autumn 2024 Budget with phased implementation. But the UBS data suggests a meaningful number of founders planning exits haven't connected their transaction timing to the tax calendar. For UK founders weighing partial sales or distributions in the next 12 months, 6 April is the kind of deadline that rewards early conversations with a tax adviser.

Where Exits Are Actually Happening

Western IPO windows remain selective. The US window opened briefly in early 2026, but SaaS repricing quickly complicated pricing for software companies, and energy volatility from the Iran conflict has kept public markets choppy. The S&P 500 posted its lowest weekly close of 2026 in early March. New Section 301 trade investigations targeting 16 partners add another layer of uncertainty for cross-border transactions. This helps explain why 40% of founders in the UBS survey expect a strategic buyer rather than an IPO or PE fund: the routes most available right now favour trade sales and dual-track processes.

Meanwhile, Asia is quietly building momentum. Hong Kong IPO fundraising jumped roughly tenfold in early 2026, with a pipeline of 380+ deals clustered in semiconductors, tech hardware, and AI. India's National Stock Exchange appointed 20 merchant bankers for its planned IPO, the highest number ever for an Indian public issue, signalling that Asia's exit infrastructure is actively reopening.

The UBS data showing that 45% of entrepreneurs are considering international expansion directly connects to exit optionality. A UK or US founder with Asia-linked revenue streams, customers, or partnerships now has a broader menu of listing venues and strategic buyer pools than at any point since 2021. The family office location guide covers jurisdictional considerations for founders weighing where to structure their post-exit wealth. The exit venue question and the domicile question are increasingly the same conversation.

Financing Backdrop Has Shifted

Two developments this week have changed the capital landscape that founders are exiting into.

US bank capital rules just loosened. Regulators reduced capital requirements by approximately 4.8%, potentially freeing up $60 billion for lending and buybacks. If banks re-enter the lending markets that private credit has dominated for the past five years, borrowing conditions for acquisition finance could improve. For founders selling to financial buyers, more available leverage typically means higher prices.

Private credit is simultaneously tightening. As covered in last week's Signal, JPMorgan marked down software loans, Morgan Stanley now forecasts direct lending defaults reaching 8%, and multiple funds have gated redemptions. For founders in sectors financed heavily by private credit (software, business services, healthcare services), the buyer pool's financing capacity is under pressure. Strategic buyers with strong balance sheets face less competition from leveraged financial buyers, which can cut both ways on pricing.

The Bank of England rate cut expectations also shifted, with BofA pushing its forecast from March to June on energy-driven inflation risk. For UK founders running deal processes: tighter multiples, more conservative debt packages, potentially longer timelines.

A third of founders are heading for the exits. Three-quarters likely to regret how they handled it. UK tax deadline is 17 days away, which changes the after-tax maths on every qualifying disposal. Asia is opening while the West stalls. Credit tightening while bank capital loosens.

These aren't separate stories. They're the same story viewed from different angles: the exit environment for founders with $5M-$100M at stake is simultaneously more available (more founders ready to sell, more buyer types, more geographies) and more punishing of poor preparation (tax changes, financing shifts, psychological unreadiness).

The founders who handled this well built their wealth architecture and aligned their tax strategy before the deal closed. But the thing that separates them most is harder to plan: an honest reckoning with what happens to their identity, their time, and their decision-making when the thing that defined them for a decade is gone.

The UBS report says a third of founders are heading for the exit. The research says most aren't ready for what's on the other side.

That gap is where most of the damage happens. Keep that in mind.